Embodiments herein generally relate to systems that colorize documents and more particularly to a method of adding color to a monochrome (single color printing) printed document that applies pre-established rules to automatically colorizes portions of the monochromatic document.
The concept of colorization of documents and film has been addressed before; however, prior colorization solutions rely upon manual processes to identify the regions that require the added color. For example, U.S. Patent Publication 2006/0171584 (the complete disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference) deals with a manually intensive process of colorizing motion picture scenes. Similarly, U.S. Patent Publication 2004/0012816 (the complete disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference) discloses a system for printing in two or more colors based on print data for monochrome printing which uses a colorization setup device that presents a data entry screen containing input fields for entering colorization information for each of a plurality of specific items. In such systems, the user is required to manually identify the items in films and documents that are to have color added.
Adding a highlight color to monochrome documents is one of the ways in which print shops can add value to their customer's existing monochrome documents. With conventional systems, in order to colorize monochrome print jobs, each print job is opened in an editor and individual objects are colorized one at a time. This process makes the migration to highlight color cost-prohibitive in the majority of cases. Further, such systems concentrate on cases in which the source document is a scanned document that is not in the portable document language (PDL) format and does not have properties of discreet objects defined, and such systems do not work well with electronic formats, where the properties of discreet objects can be discerned by inspecting the PDL file.